


If You Really Love Nothing

by Cerfblanc



Category: Dark (TV 2017)
Genre: Dark Comedy, Dubious Consent, Fluff and Angst, Friends With Benefits, M/M, Other, Post-Apocalyptic universe, Sharing a Bed, Switching, the trio living a semi-recovered life in the woods
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:06:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29068515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerfblanc/pseuds/Cerfblanc
Summary: At first it was the glances, while they washed. Then it was the little comments. Then the mutual, unspoken warmth of sleeping beside one another when it got cold. And finally, the realisation—where Noah wondered if his fondness for Jonas had been there all along.
Relationships: Elisabeth Doppler & Jonas Kahnwald, Elisabeth Doppler & Noah | Hanno Tauber, Jonas Kahnwald/Noah | Hanno Tauber
Comments: 8
Kudos: 27





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve been meaning to write something for AGES about these two, I can’t help but have a super soft spot for them. This fic will be pretty short and sweet, and will explore the many ‘situations’ between the boys (with some angst, probably). Let me know if you enjoy! :D

_**WINTER.** _   
  


He was watching the way Jonas scrubbed at his hands to rid the blood of the rabbit they had caught, when he realises he was staring, and not just watching. Jonas rubbed at his fingers like he was trying to rub away more than just the faint film of dried blood that was plastered over his calloused skin. Noah blinks, and the little bar of salvaged soap slips from Jonas’ hands and into the bucket of water with a plop.

“You’re staring at me as though you want to kill me.” He says after a moment, very quietly, when he had finished cleaning his hands. Noah looks up from where he was sat from the other end of the battered table. He felt like laughing at the comment; they knew each other well enough to make a joke out of something, but Noah had the psychic sense of knowing when something was just, a little off.

“You imitate dead game.” He states rather bluntly, testing the water.

“You imitate a religious fanatic.”

Noah snorts at that, lets out a breathy chuckle, and he sees Jonas grin for a split second without looking up to meet the other’s face. Neither of the insults were true, but they went along with them anyway. It was something to poke at. Finding things to poke at was a way of maintaining a certain degree of normality—yet there was hardly anything to poke at anymore, especially when the world was submerged in the aftermath of the apocalypse. It was difficult to look back and realise that once, everything had been good. Everything had been fine.

_It’s kind of fine now, too_ , Noah replies in his head. Humans were like any other animal. They adapted. Maybe not physically in such a short amount of time, but mentally.

Jonas scrunches his nose in thought, still picking at his bitten nails. He dries his hands with the stained rag that was sat adjacent to him. “What do you think about piling into one cabin for the winter?” He asks. 

Noah nods without a word, and gets up from the table. He was going to check on Elisabeth. She became awfully quiet when she was skinning the little animals they brought back for her; she hardly made any noise when she was outside at the front of their cabin. 

It sometimes disturbed him, for he had never met a pretty young girl to be so eager to practice such a thing. His sister Agnes, used to chase after the first red admiral butterfly she saw at the start of summer. She would never dream of cutting a smaller, living being apart— _but this is the fucking apocalypse, Hanno._

“She’ll like that.” Noah swallows, as he heads for the door. He didn’t even need to say it was Elisabeth he was referring to. The only “she” that was between him and Jonas was her, after all. 

“I was asking _you_.” Jonas adds, the second Noah’s hand turned the cold door handle. When he turns his head to look back, the immediate sight of Jonas’ boyish blue eyes meeting his sent a shiver down his spine. The subtly mournful paleness that rested in the boy’s gaze unsettled him, although rarely. He always looked as though he had just had an intense conversation with Death itself. 

“Yes,” Noah answers. “I think it’s a good idea. It’ll be safer, if we’re all together.”

* * *

Two weeks later, when Elisabeth had stepped outside and nearly slipped on frosted earth, they decided to move each of their mattresses into the small living area where the open fire was, in the cabin that belonged to Noah and Elisabeth, and rearranged the small functional kitchen to make more room.

Before the three of them had came together, it had just been Noah, and a shy, traumatised Elisabeth. When Jonas appeared bruised and disorientated, Noah had automatically assumed she wanted to be closer to him due to the fact that they knew each other before the apocalypse, had more in common, and shared the same memories of the people they once knew (also being from the same era)—but she never once opted for that, even when they had built two cabins throughout the beginning of summer and to the end of autumn.

In some way, factually and unconsciously, whoever Elisabeth chose to live with, determined who she would end up sleeping with—and for an instant Noah blurted he would be fine if she wanted to go between the two (if she got sick of him), but she didn’t understand the context of his half-formed statement, and he prayed she wasn’t as sharp as he thought she was.

Noah had mentally flogged himself that evening, just for allowing the thought to come into his head, and further shunned himself by taking a cold wash outside the morning after.

The crude yet solidly built cabins were always a work-in-progress, something that Noah decided would always need extensive attention where necessary. They often did frequent checks, in case any of the roofing needed to be replaced, or if the makeshift insulation was still intact for the next set of cold months to come.

Last summer, Noah was able to hunt two deer he had found near the outskirts of the forest, and he was adamant in keeping the hides to tan despite Jonas’ subtle grimaces, as the furs would help keep the warmth within the cabin during winter. That was when Elisabeth took an interest in the process, when she watched in silent, almost frightened awe at how Noah worked unforgivingly on the animal carcasses.

She said she wanted to change, then. In order to help. The deer hide ended up as a rug, both cut and stitched together into a minimal, logical design by Elisabeth, and had been laid on their cabin floor ever since. Jonas hadn’t liked standing barefoot on it for a while, when he left his own little cabin to help make dinner. Both Noah and Elisabeth had found that funny.

Noah felt as though he had been thumped in the temples that night, when he lay his head down into his pillow, facing Elisabeth’s small, coiled figure from across the floor.

The linen was rough and worn against his skin, but it smelled unusually nice; it reminded him of home, where he used to be, and where he had came from.   


The tiniest of tears sometimes pricked the corners of his eyes deep into the night, when he was half-anchored to the heaviest state of sleep, and the thought of Agnes—and his father—but with time and repressive effort he managed to withdraw the thoughts and feelings back into his chest, until he wanted to let them back out again, just to see if they were there and still existed. To remember if they were even _real_.

Noah swallows, eyes sealed shut. Beneath the quilt that was thrown over his body he pulls his knees to his chest, turns his head further into the pillow, lets out a gentle sigh. He could smell the faint remnants of the fire they had lit in the cobbled hearth before going to sleep. The air that hung around him was cool. He cracks open one eye to check on Elisabeth, who was closest to the dampened fire. She was still curled in the same position from before, but had her blonde hair sprawled out along her back.

He doesn’t know how much time passes between then and now—when he feels the mattress he’s laid on dip ever so slightly, near his lower back. Noah doesn’t react, because he knew it was Jonas. He could smell him, and hear him. Jonas shuffled most of the time, like naive woodland prey. That’s how Noah knew it was him.

“It’s cold.” Jonas murmurs, voice weary, and Noah doesn’t even roll over. He feels the quilt lift for a moment, and then a body settles behind him. A knee unavoidably knocks him in the lower back, and Noah lets out a gentle grunt.

“Sorry.”

_Whatever_ , came the internal reply.

He expected to feel more uncomfortable having Jonas pressed up against him for the first time, but he didn’t. Noah was unsure if he should feel somewhat horrified of the aspect—at one point, in the initial days of meeting, they had disliked each other. He nearly saw Jonas as a threat to his and Elisabeth’s setup, and Jonas had thought Noah was unreasonably menacing, but maybe that was because they were both male, and there wasn’t going to be just one alpha that made the group.

Differences aside, they somehow got used to one another, Elisabeth being the pacifier between them, almost acting like a counsellor sometimes. It made Noah realise that she had far more maturity than both him and Jonas combined.

But apart from that, Noah had never expected their friendship to become as soft as this.

A couple of hours later, he woke again, this time feeling as though he was suffocating with the heat that enveloped his body. In the cold dark, he could still smell Jonas—but now Elisabeth. Both of them. 

Noah opens his eyes, feels his nose itch, and he swipes a lock of blonde hair away from his face, and realises that the three of them were squished together on a single mattress. Jonas had his back to him. Noah sits up between them, and notices how Elisabeth was curled up against his side, rolled in her own blanket, lips parted in a deep, peaceful slumber. 

_ She must have been cold too.  _

He then realises he was sweating from the heat between them all, and he struggles to free himself from the tight wedge he was stuck in, and breathes out when he’s wearily stood over them, warm bare feet against the deer hide rug on the cabin floor.

Noah brushes back the stray hairs from his brow. “Really?” He utters to himself.

He actually welcomed the settled cold of the cabin, when he decided to take Jonas’ makeshift bed for the rest of the night, unable to withstand the stifling heat of sharing with two other bodies.


	2. Chapter 2

_**SPRING.** _

When the weather softened and the mornings became lighter they often washed themselves outside. Whilst building the cabins during the last year, Jonas recovered some planks of wooden decking he found when scratching around the nearest abandoned neighbourhood. Noah was confused at first, said they had enough wood, until Jonas explained they could create an outdoor showering area; the used water would slip through gaps of the decking, and soak into the earth beneath it. 

They eventually found an old galvanised bathtub, hauled it through the forest, and scrubbed it down. It wasn’t big enough for the boys—but it was just the right size for Elisabeth to settle into. She was always the first to wash.

She sometimes asked Noah to help tease out the knots from her wet hair, and when she saw him take off his boots to walk upon the decking, she sank deep into the mildly warm water to hide her bare shoulders. He always sat behind her. He never tried to look, and did what he was told. 

The soapy bath water was never visibly grimy when she got out—as the work she did was often indoors, which didn’t involve a lot of muck unless she was attempting to plant seeds and bulbs into their progressive garden of paraphernalia—and the boys often used the rest of it. 

Privacy was never a thing between Noah and Jonas. It never had been. They had the same bodies, and they were both guys, and neither of them were self-conscious about anything. However, they always made sure they maintained a small distance between themselves and Elisabeth, as that almost felt like a code of conduct, and went ahead without question. 

Noah is leant over the bathtub, soaking his hair and splashing the soap from his face when he feels Jonas’ eyes settle somewhere along the side of his body. When he stands upright, he turns his head a little, water dripping from the tip of his nose, and meets the other’s eyes in seconds. Jonas just glances away, as though there was nothing to hide—but everyone always had something to hide, even if they were stood wet and stark naked in front of one another. 

Noah rubs the soap between his palms once more before setting it aside, and lathers his underarms. Slowly, in thought, as his hand passes across his chest, his fingers wander down his side to feel the bones that made his ribcage. They weren’t awfully prominent like he thought they’d be, but they were there, hard little ridges beneath taut, young skin. 

He suddenly hears a chuckle slip from Jonas’ lips, and Noah looks up. 

“I was about to ask if you—eat enough, but…” He trails off, and lets out a humourless laugh, unsure of what else to say. He shakes his head. His wet, strawberry-blonde hair clings in locks. 

Noah takes in Jonas’s physique from where he was stood. He was lean. They both were. _Maybe a little too lean_ , Noah adds. But that’s how things were. There was never enough food. 

“I could ask you the same thing.” He replies. 

Jonas smiles, looks at him, and shakes his head once more. He rubs his face, and his fingers flit behind his ears for a moment. “It’s the way things are, I guess. Until whenever.” 

“It’s getting better.” Noah says. “There might be less of that tinned crap, but there’s more game coming into the forest.”

He had never liked the canned food. Even before, where he belonged, he remembered Agnes bringing some small, weighty tins home from the local shop, and recalled his perplexity at how food was eventually going to be half-manufactured rather than caught and produced from the earth. Seeing the concept still exist now, made him wonder if he should trust his intuition more often. 

“The tinned stuff isn’t that bad. You just have different taste.” Jonas replies. 

Noah hums. “Obviously.” _I don’t belong here._

He ensures to discreetly mimic the soft, carefree tonality of Jonas’ voice. He knew from the moment he met his eyes that this was below small-talk. This was pointless. They never did this. It was an utterly bad coverup for something more, because Noah knew Jonas hadn’t been observing how gaunt he looked—and Noah wasn’t stupid by any means. 

He _knew_ that look. 

When he worked behind the bar at the inn, he used to look at the pretty, subdued girls with that same look. He sometimes wondered if he would ever look at Elisabeth that way, when she comes of age. But he had never experienced this with a male counterpart. This was strange, and ultimately foreign to him in all aspects. He had looked at girls that way, but not boys. 

Jonas’ eyes had been lingering elsewhere against him, and Noah recognised that fleeting glance instantly. 

* * *

A week later, it rained heavily.

For several days the whole forest dampened and absorbed the wet weather like a sponge, and a few persistent leaks were produced from the cabins’ roofing.

Jonas automatically volunteered to fix the issue from the outside, and Noah attempted to assist from the inside. Elisabeth cut up large pieces of rigid old tarp for them to use.

The times in which Noah found Jonas at his most determined and occupied was when he was physically doing something, but while they contained the leaks Noah picked up on how Jonas often see-sawed between depression and vigour.

It was a strange thing to observe from afar; the way in which he’d suddenly stop hammering crude joints into some half-repaired part of their home, and slowly wander away from it all in silence, as though he had remembered something that was worth his time recalling and brooding over.

When that happened, Noah would just watch. He never interfered. He had done that once, unsure of how to approach the situation, and was spiked with instant anger when Jonas told him to fuck off. They both ended up muddy and black-and-blue, and only stopped clawing at one another when Elisabeth intervened—by chucking a bucket of icy water over them.

Regardless of the episodic experiences Noah endured, when Jonas’ wasn’t wallowing in self-pity and a combination of other things, he sometimes overworked himself as a distraction. He did this while they worked on the cabin rooftops. When it rained for another two days, Noah had the common sense to stop and stay inside. Jonas didn’t, of course, and fell ill the day after.

_Idiot_ , Noah thinks, as he mentally retraces the scenario in his head.

Even when the leaks were fixed, he had to do twice as much work while Jonas was confined to his bed. Elisabeth opted to look after him with her gently optimistic and attentive nature.

As he observed what she did, Noah found there was something inexplicably soothing about being coddled back to health by a girl. He didn’t know how she was able to summon that kind of energy let alone project it onto him and Jonas, when they were living in the ghost of the apocalypse.

Noah made supper that night. When he had finished cooking the rabbit meat, he wiped his hands on a rag before going into the next tiny room. He found Elisabeth knelt beside the mattress Jonas was laid on. He was on his side, visibly asleep. 

Noah comes forward, stepping slowly, and sets a gentle hand against the back of the girl’s head. She looks up at him with a small smile, and he notices how the delicate skin under her eyes had been blushed pink and purple from the lack of sleep.

“ _Go eat. I made supper_.” He both signs and mouths.

“ _You?_ ”

“ _In a moment. After_.”

She nods and gets to her feet, and slips out of the room. When he heard the quiet clatter of the few ceramic plates they owned, Noah quietly sat down in her place beside Jonas. He crosses his legs and allows himself to watch the other with a bottled-up curiosity he never got to release.

He liked watching people, especially when they were unaware that they were being watched. It sometimes felt like he didn’t exist, and he often enjoyed the feeling. It helped him forget when he needed to. Voyeurism (although non-sexual) was a distraction.

Noah shuffles forward. He doesn’t plan what he was going to do, nor does he ask himself what he was doing—every movement he made came instinctively, and the fact that he knew Jonas was physically unconscious gave him the extra encouragement to do what he wanted.

With great hesitation, he reaches out a hand, and his fingers slowly part away from one another in unison, as they eventually come to touch Jonas’ exposed throat. They touch the cruel scar that lay around his neck like a permanent noose.

Noah feels the skin very lightly; it had healed, but not smoothly. He could feel how warm and alive Jonas was. Pity quietly overwhelms him, and he leans forward. He plants the softest of kisses at the boy’s forehead, and smells the mixture of soap and musk within his hair. 

“I’m sorry.” Noah utters in a breath.

He wouldn’t wish this kind of suffering on his worst enemy. It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair—and deep down, Noah knew it never would be. That was the way things were, and that was how they were meant to be.

The tip of his nose brushes Jonas’ hairline as he pulls away after a moment. Noah sighs to himself then, very quietly. He glances away and takes in his surroundings, swallows down the flitting apprehension of the unknown to come. He remembers that the world was never meant to be like this. The three of them were never actually meant to be bonded like this.

“What are you sorry for?”

A combination of embarrassment and shock plagues his stomach the instant he hears Jonas speak. Noah snaps his gaze back to the mattress, nearly jumps at the sound of the other’s wide-awake voice.

“You’re—meant to be asleep.” Noah starts, blinking. _Fuck_.

“I’m hungry. I smell food.”

Noah goes to get up, body a little too eager to flee the room. “Fine. I’ll tell Elisabeth—“

“Wait,” Jonas reaches out, and his fingers just miss Noah’s wrist. “Do it again.”

Noah turns back to him. Dread fills his lungs.

“Do what?”

_ Why am I so afraid? _

They don’t say anything to one another, but they watch each other in a silent, tortuous debate. Jonas looks at him with soft, boyish eyes. Noah just clenches his jaw at the sight, and averts his gaze.

“No.” He finally says, and leaves the room.

That was a private moment meant for him only. It was never meant for Jonas.


End file.
